Electronic equipment using semiconductor devices are essential for many modern applications. With the advancement of electronic technology, semiconductor devices are becoming increasingly smaller in size while having greater functionality and greater amounts of integrated circuitry. Due to the miniaturized scale of the semiconductor device, wafer level packaging (WLP) is widely used because of its low cost and relatively simple manufacturing operations. During the WLP operation, a number of semiconductor components are assembled on the semiconductor device. Furthermore, numerous manufacturing operations are implemented within such a small semiconductor device.
Technological advances in materials and design have produced generations of semiconductor device where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. In the course of advancement and innovation, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometric size (i.e., the smallest component that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. The manufacturing operations of the semiconductor device involve many steps and operations on such a small and thin semiconductor device. Such advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing semiconductor devices. A decrease of the geometric size of the semiconductor device may cause deficiencies such as poor electrical interconnection, inaccurate placement of components or other issues, which results in a high yield loss of the semiconductor device. The semiconductor device is produced in an undesired configuration, which further wastes materials and thus increases the manufacturing cost.
The semiconductor device is assembled with a number of integrated components, while the geometric size of the semiconductor device becomes smaller and smaller. As such, there are many challenges for modifying a structure of the semiconductor devices and improving the manufacturing operations.